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We investigate the effects of financial risk cycles on business cycles, using a panel spanning 73 countries since 1900. Agents use a Bayesian learning model to form their beliefs about risk. We construct a proxy of these beliefs and show that perceived low risk encourages risk-taking, augmenting growth at the cost of accumulating financial vulnerabilities, and, therefore, a reversal in growth follows. The reversal is particularly pronounced when the low-risk environment persists and credit growth is excessive. Global risk cycles have a stronger effect on growth than local risk cycles via their impact on capital flows, investment, and debt-issuer quality. Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix , which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

US output is more strongly correlated with the output of energy-exporting countries than with that of energy-importing countries. I first document this empirical finding, then construct a three-country model in which countries' different energy production and trade structures are considered. The three countries are the USA (an energy importer), a non-US energy importer, and an energy exporter. Consistent with the empirical findings, the model produces a higher output correlation between the USA and the energy exporter than between the USA and the energy importer. A positive productivity shock in the USA, raising its output, leads to increases in energy prices and its import demand for energy. The increased energy prices adversely influence output in the energy importer, whereas the rise in US energy imports has positive effects on output in the energy exporter, enabling the correlation of US output with the exporter's output to be higher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Turkey is one of those countries where housing market has been most severely affected by COVID-19 pandemic. Today the effects of the outbreak have been eliminated significantly. This study retrospectively looks at the days when the world faced a widespread outbreak of a pandemic and investigates the effect of the pandemic and the changes in consumer confidence on housing prices and the volatility of housing prices. Considering the structural breaks in the analysis period (2010:q1-2022:q4 quarterly), we used the Lee and Strazicich structural break unit root test as a research method. The results show that an increase in costs due to a break in the supply chain and containment measures forcing the workforce to stay at home affected the housing supply adversely. It is observable that expansionary economic policies and social assistance programs have a positive effect on housing demand. In this regard, negative supply shock and positive demand pressure are seen to be the determinants of the recent housing price increases in Turkey. However, while there is a positive relationship between consumer confidence and house prices, the effect of house prices on the volatility is statistically insignificant.

In a 2019 article published in this journal, Kyer and Maggs examined the frequency and characteristics of double-dip recessions and multi-dip recessions for 21 countries during the 1960:1 to 2014:4 period. A review of Kyer and Maggs generated a number of questions about a particular feature of their business cycle dating methodology. Specifically, they determined that a recession ends once real gross domestic product returns to or exceeds the previous peak level of real gross domestic product. To demonstrate the impact this nontraditional feature of their methodology has on their results and conclusions, this paper repeats their analysis where, in contrast to Kyer and Maggs, it is assumed that a recession ends once the economy reaches the trough quarter in a business cycle. The application of this more traditional feature of business cycle dating methodology to the same countries and sample period yields results that do not support their conclusions about either the frequency of double-dip recessions or the number of countries in their sample that experienced multi-dip recessions. This paper first shows that double-dip recessions represent just 7.2% of all recessions and, therefore, are not as common as Kyer and Maggs reported. Second, only five of the 21 countries experienced recessions with two or more additional dips in economic activity over the entire sample period. Finally, only six countries experienced a multi-dip recession during the Great Recession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economic crisis generated by the COVID-19 pandemic was fundamentally different from those of the past, with unforeseen implication on supply chains and European trade. As the literature regarding the pandemic is vast bibliometric techniques were used to find the most influential themes and authors. The aim of this paper is to test if cascading failure is possible when shocks arise in European trade.

We integrate bank and bond financing into a two-sector neoclassical growth model and identify an automatic stabilization effect due to endogenous bank leverage adjustment. We show that although bank leverage amplifies shocks, the increase of leverage due to a decline in bank equity partially offsets the post crisis decline of bank lending and accelerates economic recovery by reducing the persistence of the bank lending channel. In this case, endogenous leverage adjustment is an automatic stabilizer. Regulatory state-independent capital limits and wage rigidities impair the re-allocation of capital between sectors and weaken this automatic stabilization. A quantitative analysis of the US during the Great Recession shows that the magnitude of automatic stabilization can be significant and informs about potentially high costs of strict capital regulation or wage rigidities during banking crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – This paper analyses the possibility of Latin America's (LA) major economies adopting dollarization, considering that in the last decade macroeconomic instability has once again challenged the ability of certain economies to properly manage their own currency. Design/methodology/approach – To determine the feasibility of adopting the US dollar as official currency, the author uses the framework of optimum currency area (OCA) theory, since, in fact, dollarization is an incomplete monetary union. The author uses a structural vector autoregressive (SVAR) model to identify what type of structural shock — country-specific, regional or global — prevails in LA economies. For this purpose, the US output is used to represent the global output and determine how the shocks of the US influence the output trajectory of each LA nation. The higher the influence of the US product, the lower the costs of adopting the US dollar. Findings – The results of the variance decomposition show that the influence of the US shocks in the gross domestic product (GDP) trajectory of LA countries has significantly decreased over the last two decades, even in the currently dollarized economies. The estimates for Venezuela and Argentina show that the importance of US shocks in the trajectory of their GDP is low. Therefore, the cost of adopting the US dollar as the official currency would be high. Originality/value – In view of hyperinflation and macroeconomic imbalances in certain LA nations, the dollarization debate has resurfaced in recent years. However, the literature that empirically evaluates the feasibility of adopting dollarization as a monetary system under current economic conditions is limited.

This paper describes the set of Bayesian vector autoregression (BVAR) models that Banco de España uses to project GDP growth rates and to simulate macrofinancial risk scenarios for Brazil and Mexico. The toolkit consists of large benchmark models to produce baseline projections and various smaller satellite models to conduct risk scenarios. We showcase the use of this modeling framework with tailored empirical applications. Given the material importance of Brazil and Mexico to the Spanish economy and banking system, this toolkit contributes to the monitoring of Spain’s international risk exposure.

We build a small open economy business cycle model with search and matching frictions to assess the impact of labor market policies on the dynamics of employment and other macroeconomic variables in emerging economies. The model features an endogenous selection mechanism by which inefficient jobs are destroyed in recessions, thus linking labor market dynamics and aggregate productivity. In a quantitative version of the model calibrated to the Mexican economy, we find that reducing labor taxes and increasing firing costs would have mitigated the fall in employment during the Great Recession of 2008–2009. However, by preventing firms from dismissing low-productive workers, higher firing costs would have impaired this selection mechanism, thus generating a larger fall in TFP and delaying the recovery. Cutting labor taxes, in contrast, have minor effects on productivity by mainly affecting hiring decisions. An extension of the model shows that lowering labor taxes provides an additional productivity boost by expanding formal hirings and reducing the informality rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to investigate the co-movement between the credit growth and gross domestic product (GDP) growth in Turkey over the period January 2004–October 2019. By taking into account alternative credit decomposition and the variations over time and across frequencies using the wavelet analysis, the results show that: i) GDP growth highly synchronizes with credit growth compared to other financial variables such as stock exchange, bonds, and exchange rate. ii) There is a high correlation between commercial loan growth and capital formation and a relatively weak one with consumer loans and consumption. iii) Co-movement stemming from Turkish Lira (TL) credits to GDP growth is stronger than foreign exchange (FX) credits where the latter is significant until 2015. iv) Public and domestic private banks are the main drivers of economic activity while the foreign banks are following them. By showing the differential effects of different types of credit on GDP growth, we specify that shocks to different credit types are crucial to analyze business cycles. For policymakers, this result implies that the dynamics of different credit types are crucial to analyze the impacts of credit cycles on economic activity.

Aim/purpose – The aim of the undertaken research is to analyse the interdependencies between cyclical changes in consumer prices, production prices, wages and production in the euro area in the period Q1.2010-Q3.2017.

This paper investigates spillovers to the Irish economy from a fiscal expansion in the rest of the euro area. We examine spillovers for government consumption and government investment, each conditional on active or passive monetary policy. Moreover, we compare these across two different classes of models, a DSGE model and a traditional structural model. We find that expansionary fiscal spending shocks in the rest of the euro area can lead to non-negligible spillovers to the Irish economy. This result is robust across models and spending instruments, but is conditional on the monetary stance being passive. When monetary policy is active, the spillover is smaller, depending on the extent of crowding out of private activity. When monetary policy is passive, spillovers increase the fiscal space of the country with positive spillovers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of the link between production, measured in gross domestic product and CO2 emissions, is a topic under intense research. Carbon emissions are moving together with economic shocks (high synchronicity), particularly at troughs and peaks of a business cycle. This research investigates the influence of economic shocks to carbon emissions. Previous studies do not provide a direct empirical evidence on the impact of economic shocks to carbon emissions that are available. We employ structural vector autoregression to explore the impact of economic shocks on carbon emissions in 20 advanced economies from 1870 to 2016. Our empirical results prove a strong, statistically significant connection between emissions and output with a coefficient of elasticity > 1. We identify a strong empirical link using panel structural vector autoregression between carbon emissions and real GDP growth per capita. Up to 40% of the fluctuations in CO2 emissions is explained by combined economic factors (output, population, oil prices, stock exchange). The findings further indicate that carbon emission is determined by energy policy (energy intensity, carbon intensity, relative costs of renewable energy). Our findings contribute to energy policy management, energy, and business cycle research to inspire novel research on energy cycles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the consequences of the financial and sovereign debt crises on the evolution of the business cycle synchronization across all the Euro Area members. We take advantage of the dimension reduction properties of dynamic factor models to summarize a large dataset of macroeconomic indicators for the Euro Area countries. Then, we estimate latent state variables based on Markov-switching methodologies to obtain a time-varying measure of business cycle synchronization. The combination of these two techniques allows us to describe the evolution in the degree of coincidence of the business cycle phases along time for this set of countries. Our results suggest that there was a general decline in the degree of business cycle synchronization across the Euro Area countries following the financial and the sovereign debt crises. Although they have recovered the levels of business cycle synchronization exhibited before these events, there are significant differences across countries in the required time to recover those levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the relationship between domestic saving and the current account in developing countries. Our three main findings are that: (i) domestic saving has a small effect on the current account; (ii) domestic saving has a significant positive effect on the trade balance—this effect is much larger than the effect that domestic saving has on the current account; and (iii) domestic saving has a significant negative effect on net‐current transfers. We use countries in the SSA region during the period 1980‐2009 as a laboratory for an instrumental variables (IV) approach. The IV approach enables to obtain estimates of causal effects. Underlying the IV approach is the significant positive first‐stage response of domestic saving to plausibly exogenous annual rainfall: an unanticipated, transitory supply‐side shock. We construct a small open‐economy DSGE model with debt adjustment costs and endogenous current transfers to match the empirical findings. The model enables to examine the relationship between domestic saving and the current account for different types of shocks. An important message of our paper is that, for developing countries, estimates of the relationship between domestic saving and domestic investment are not informative for answering the question how domestic saving affects a country's accumulation of net foreign assets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines whether learning-by-doing plays an important role in emerging economies. A business cycle model with learning-by-doing is presented and estimated using the data of emerging and developed economies. Its performance is considered from the viewpoint of predictive performance and the business cycle moments focused on in recent studies, namely, high volatility of consumption relative to that of output, and highly countercyclical net exports. The model with learning-by-doing outperforms the trend productivity shocks proposed by Aguiar and Gopinath (J Polit Econ 115(1):69–102, 2007) in predictive performance and it can also replicate the key business cycle moments. This is made possible through enhancing the persistence of productivity shocks and affecting the household's expectation of permanent income. Further, the model is consistent with the observed relationships between the business cycle moments and growth rates. These results suggest the essential role of learning-by-doing in emerging economies and imply a possible reason for the difference in business cycles in emerging and developed economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rich dynamics of capital flows is an important characteristic of business cycles in emerging market economies. In the data external debt is always procyclical, while FDI is procyclical only in normal times. We provide a microfounded rationale for this pattern by linking financial shocks to capital flows. For this purpose, we build a small open economy model in which firms are subject to borrowing constraints, and are either owned domestically or by foreign investors who purchase firms through FDI. During a financial crisis, the valuation gap per unit net worth between foreign and domestic investors widens, which triggers more FDI inflow. Our model produces business cycle moments consistent with empirical observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we map the growth cycle synchronization across the European Union, specifically focusing on the position of the Visegrad Four countries. We study the synchronization using frequency and time–frequency domain. To accommodate for dynamic relationships among the countries, we propose a wavelet cohesion measure with time-varying weights. Analyzing quarterly data from 1995 to 2017, we show an increasing co-movement of the Visegrad Four countries with the European Union after the countries have accessed the European Union. We show that participation in a currency union increases the co-movement of the country adopting the Euro. Furthermore, we find a high degree of synchronization at business cycle frequencies of the Visegrad Four and countries of the European monetary union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]